Determining when to leave to start your own company, making strategic bets, and selling to enterprise customers w/ Anhang Zhu @ TierZero

Anhang Zhu, CEO & Co-Founder @ TierZero, joins Jerry to share his background as a founder of two different companies! They discuss his transition from Facebook, and how he used his time within a large, successful org to learn how to build from zero to one successfully – and how he applied those lessons to becoming a founder, along with his time working on building infrastructure @ Niantic. Anhang also shares insights on finding a co-founder you trust & why that is so important to navigating tough times, how people management skills also help you with managing AI tools, fundraising strategies, selling to enterprise-scale customers, and developing software product problem-solving tools.

ABOUT ANHANG ZHU

Anhang Zhu is the co-founder and CEO of TierZero, the AI agent that operates your code in production. Before TierZero, he spent six years at Facebook on the early ads team, then founded a gaming company acquired by Niantic/Pokémon Go, where he led platform engineering teams at GCP's largest customer.

SHOW NOTES:

• AZ’s transition from eng leader to founder (0:24)
• What drew AZ to becoming a founder (1:20)
• Building from zero to one @ Facebook & preparing to be a founder (3:44)
• AZ’s experience working on Facebook ads (4:58)
• The fundraising process for AZ’s esport coaching platform (9:32)
• Strategies for finding users / building a community (12:14)
• Convincing investors to back you & your product (14:38)
• Takeaways from Facebook that helped develop AZ as a founder (19:00)
• Learn to break down tasks for both people & agentic tools (21:35)
• The transition from nearly shutting down to catching Fortnite & Niantic’s attention (25:10)
• Focus on your customers & their problems (31:11)
• Lessons learned from navigating challenging times as a founder (33:58)
• The story behind AZ starting his second company (36:36)
• AZ’s bet that AI models would continue to become more agentic (38:37)
• Why AZ transitioned his product’s audience from startups to enterprises (39:05)
• Identifying which enterprise deals are most likely to be successful (42:36)
• Insights for selling to enterprise / optimizing your resources (45:55)
• Tactics for competing against much larger companies (48:40)
• Using agentic tools to synthesize & prioritize customer needs (50:17)
• AZ’s eng org structure & how AI fits into it (54:35)
• Quality control insights (57:13)
• What the future looks like for addressing software production issues (59:00)
• Tips for building AI-native teams / startups (1:01:13)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• TierZero - TierZero isn't a traditional software company that bolted AI onto an existing product. We're AI-native: we use AI agents to build, ship, and operate our own infrastructure.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

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